1. May death and damnation, And consternation, Flit up from hell with pure intent! Smash them at Manchester, Glasgow, Leeds, and Chester; Drench all with blood from Avon to Trent.
2. They stifle children's wits under a pile of useless knowledge; but of all sciences the most absurd, in my opinion, and the one most capable of stifling any sort of genius, is geometry. This ridiculous science has as its subjects surfaces, lines and points which do not exist in nature. In your mind you make a hundred thousand curved lines pass between a circle and its tangent, although in reality you can't even make a straw pass. Truly, geometry is only a bad joke.
3. For the Government of the day, having been defeated by seven votes on a proposal to include raisins in the sub-section of the Retail Prices 'Control' Bill which referred to currants, figs, dates, prunes and dried apricots, decided very naturally to treat the defeat as a vote of want of confidence in their policy of Imperial Defence and Development, and, dissolving Parliament, appealed to the suffrages of all right-thinking men and women in the country. The Opposition, with a monstrous whoop of official joy and secretly furious because they had never meant to defeat the Government and were not ready for an election, also rushed into the fray with a passionate appeal for the support of all right-thinking men and women.
4. Oh! My prestidigitation Is the bulwark of the nation And I like my new creation As Mi-Lord High Conjurer-er-er. CHORUS: Oh! His prestidigitation Is the bulwark of the nation And he likes his new creation As The Lord High Conjurer-er-er-er-er.
5. But, to answer your demands, I must own, madam, that I do know your husband, and he me; that this knowledge has grown up with us from our childhood; and, that I may be a witness against myself for the injury I am compelled by love to do him, I do also own, divine Camilla, that you too well know the tenderness of our mutual friendship: yet love is a sufficient excuse for all my errors, if they were much more criminal than they are.
6. If I think of Virginia now it is as she was when I last saw her in the spring of 1938 outside the changing rooms in the London Library. There she stood, all flushed and hot after a hard day's reading. Impulsively perhaps I went up to her and seized her hand. 'It's Mrs Woolf, isn't it?' 'Is it?' she said and looked at me out of those large limpid eyes. 'Is it? I often wonder,' and she wandered away.
7. Our favourite Mathematics, the highly prized exponent of all these other sciences, has also become more and more mechanical. Excellence in what is called its higher departments depends less on natural genius than on acquired expertness in wielding its machinery. Without undervaluing the wonderful results which a Lagrange or Laplace educes by means of it, we may remark, that their calculus, differential and integral, is little else than a more cunningly-constructed arithmetical mill; where the factors being put in, are, as it were, ground into the true product, under cover, and without other effort on our part than the steady turning of the handle. We have more Mathematics than ever; but less Mathesis.
8. Gregory resumed in high oratorical good humour.
'An artist is identical with an anarchist,' he cried. 'You might transpose the words anywhere. An anarchist is an artist. The man who throws a bomb is an artist, because he prefers a great moment to everything. He sees how much more valuable is one burst of blazing light, one peal of perfect thunder, than the mere common bodies of a few shapeless policemen. An artists disregards all governments, abolishes all conventions. The poet delights in disorder only. If it were not so, the most poetical thing in the world would be the Underground Railway.'
9. The blockhead who affects wisdom, because nature has given him dulness, becomes ridiculous only by his adopted character; whereas he might have stagnated unobserved in his native mud, or perhaps have engrossed deeds, collected shells, and studied heraldry, or logic, with some success.
10. Hobbs hints blue, -- straight he turtle eats. Nobbs prints blue, -- claret crowns his cup. Nokes outdares Stokes in azure feats, -- Both gorge. Who fished the murex up? What porridge had John Keats?